Wonder Women! Searches for Pop Culture’s Heroines

Katie Pineda, a young girl who appears in Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, will teach viewers a lesson about comics that few others could.

[bug id=”sxsw2012″] An avid fan of comic books, Katie can talk about her favorites at length. Despite the occasional stammer, she is incredibly well-spoken for a fourth grader. But speaking isn’t how she teaches. What we learn from Katie is through her favorite character: Wonder Woman. And what we learn is that she probably idolizes the DC Comics character because, frankly, there aren’t nearly enough superheroines worth emulating.

“I just thought, ‘[Wonder Woman is] important in all these different moments historically, and wouldn’t it be interesting to hang up a larger dialog about women as heroes and women represented in popular culture and use her as a vehicle to guide that?'” Wonder Women! director Kristy Guevara-Flanigan said in an interview with Wired.

The fact that there aren’t many female heroes in comic books isn’t that shocking — comics have always been something of a sausagefest — but what seems to be overlooked is girls like Katie, one of many young women who would love a few more heroines to look up to. And, as this documentary shows, Wonder Woman has had such an impact since her creation in the early 1940s — from inspiring Rosie the Riveters to Riot Grrrls — that she herself deserves more credit than she gets.

Wonder Women!, which premieres Saturday at the South by Southwest Film festival, was originally conceived after Guevara-Flanigan — whose day job is teaching film at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area — saw an article about Gail Simone, the first female ongoing writer for the comic from 2007 to 2010.

What the director found as she started digging was that Wonder Woman’s original incarnation, as created by William Moulton Marston in 1941, was a very feminist character that became fairly milquetoast during the more conservative post-World War II era, only to be revived and embraced during the Second Wave Feminist movement (the first cover of Ms. magazine featured an image of the heroine with the line “Wonder Woman for President”).

Katie Pineda is the shining young star of Wonder Women!Image courtesy Vaquera Films

Guevara-Flanigan’s documentary traces how Wonder Woman’s presence influenced the Riot Grrrl political punk movement of the 1990s — Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman Kathleen Hanna trashing of the Spice Girls’ embrace of “Girl Power” is particularly phenomenal — and also puts in stark contrast the fact that so many women in the 20th century looked up to Wonder Woman because there really weren’t many other characters on which they could train their admiration.

“I think when you’re little, and looking at people’s knees, you’re so powerless and so unequal that it’s really helpful to be able to think yourself into someone who is powerful,” Ms. magazine co-founder Gloria Steinem says in the film. “Even more powerful than grown-ups.”

Wonder Woman's first cover, in Sensation Comics No. 1.Drawing on input from other feminist thinkers, comic book scholars and fans at New York Comic Con (as well as Katie Pineda), Wonder Women! turns what could’ve just been a flat history of a comic book character into a brief study of female empowerment in the last century. This is especially clear in a vignette with a young single mother, who serves as the narrative’s real-world superhero (complete with Wonder Woman tattoo).

Guevara-Flanigan also smartly goes to television’s original Wonder Woman — Lynda Carter, whose strong belief that her character was meant to be a central figure in the community of women, instead of someone to inspire jealousy among them, is a revelation. (Fun fact: Carter came up with the spin that turns Diana Prince into the heroine in the TV show.)

Hearing all the testimonies for Wonder Woman in the movie, it’s easy to think, “Wait, she can’t be the be-all, end-all that she’s being made out to be. What about Jean Grey/Phoenix? Or Jordan O’Neill in G.I. Jane?” And yes, it’s true those female characters existed, but consider this: In 2010, social sciences scholar Kathryn Gilpatric — a subject of the film — did a study or 157 female action characters and found that half were evil characters, doomed to death. Another 30 percent that weren’t villains were killed off, dying in self-sacrifice (think Trinity in The Matrix trilogy, Phoenix in X-Men: The Last Stand).

The documentary doesn’t end on a downer. In a brief montage, we are reminded that in recent years new heroines have risen out of Phoenix’s ashes, so to speak. Lisbeth Salander has proven hacking (among other tools of vengeance) can enable a whole new kind of justice in the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo book and films. Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games will soon show theater audiences just how revolutionary female self-preservation can be.

If those characters keep inspiring young women like Katie Pineda, the future is secure.

“Not all superheroes have powers, like, most of them are just regular people, but they became something more, and that’s how they inspire me,” she says in the film. “Sometimes I get picked on at school but I just tell myself, ‘Keep going, keep going, you’re going to be more.’ Because some day they’re going to be wishing that they treated me better.”